AMD Releases ATI Radeon 7900 Series GPU

Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) announced its 7900 Series GPU in December. The first to arrive in the market was the 7970 HD followed by the 7950 HD. Both cards are now the top dogs in the market. Previously Nvidia was ruling the market with its GTX 580 but now it seems as if history has repeated itself once again and ATI is going to claim a lot of sales and reputation in the GPU market. The same thing happened back in 2010 when AMD gave DirectX 11 GPU architecture an early break and ruled the market for almost a year. But now Nvidia has announced that they will soon get to the market this time, most likely in Q2 2012 as reported by a Japanese Website. Well we will see that later. But for now ATI is the king again and let see what it has brought to us this time. Here is a detailed spec table for both the 7900 series GPUs

GPU/Specs

AMD Radeon™ HD 7950

AMD Radeon™ HD 7970

Release Date

Jan 9, 2012

Dec 22, 2011

Core Clock

800 MHz

925 MHz

Memory Clock

1250 MHz

1375 MHz

Memory Size

3 GB

3 GB

Bandwidth

240 GB/s

264 GB/s

Bus Width

384 Bit

384 Bit

Memory Type

GDDR5

GDDR5

Shader Model

5.0

5.0

Shaders

1792

2048

ROPs

32

32

Die Size

365 mm2

365mm2

Technology

28 nm

28 nm

DirectX support

11.1

11.1

Bus Interface

PCI-E 3.0×16

PCI-E 3.0×16

GPU

Tahiti

Tahiti

Price

550-600 USD

450-500 USD

Following are some of the available GPU-Z Screenshots of HD 7950 and HD 7970 for your consideration. Although they are taken on an overclocked GPU but they’ll do the job.

AMD Radeon™ HD 7970 GPU-Z

AMD Radeon™ HD 7950 GPU-Z

The new AMD 7900 series is much cooler thanks to the 28nm die, consumes much less power and when we compare the 7950 HD to GTX 580 it beats it in most games in a much lesser price. While it is a big blow for Nvidia, AMD still lacks in PhysX and Cuda.

With the release of 7900 Series as the top range at AMD, announcements of many more Budget GPUs are underway according to a recently leaked report. The report claims that the 7700 series which includes 7750 and 7770 will be released on March 15 and will fall around a 150 USD price range. Whereas in the month after March the 7800 series will be revealed including the 7850 and 7870 GPUs which fall in 200-300 USD price range. Well these are just introductory prices, but we hope that Nvidia will try its best to cut down the prices of AMD cards by building up some competition.